Author's Notes: Afternoon, lovelies! Many thanks as ever for the very generous feedback, love, hits, reviews, messages, and so on. It all makes me far happy than should be legal.

Just FYI, I'm almost out of buffer chapters now (which makes me very anxious, even though I've never used this system before), and the one buffer chapter I DO have is probably going to be scrapped because I'm not happy with it. I had all sorts of plans about doing lots of writing this week during every waking hour that I'm not at work in order to get nicely ahead of myself, but it turns out that until the weekend, I'm basically booked up with observations, appraisals, and induction deadlines which I didn't realise were quite so frighteningly close. So this is just an advanced warning in case chapters don't get uploaded in time... it's work's fault. Lucky I adore the job, really.

For now, on with the show...

Chapter Thirteen

"Hey! Get up, put your trousers on, and get out! Always breaks my heart to say those words..."

"Bugger off" Ianto grumbled into his pillow, having hoped that if he kept his eyes closed and his breathing regular as Jack once again let himself into the flat, he'd leave him alone. Of course, the mere thought was folly.

"No can do, DI Jones. We've got a case, and you're coming with me to investigate the scene."

Jack's voice roamed across the room, his statement punctuated by a brutal tug on the curtains which exposed Ianto's defenceless eyelids to the cold light of day. Pain sliced through across his delicate brain, reminding him regretfully of the previous evening. Too much whiskey in too short a time. But he remembered it all – including, to his intense chagrin, the part where Jack insisted on helping him get undressed out of his suit and tucked into bed. At least the migraine was taking his mind off the acute embarrassment.

Something landed across his legs with a soft thump – clothing, he assumed – and the scrape of a drawer felt like a cheese grater dragging across the inside of his skull.

"Nice underpants" Jack commented, and Ianto opened his eyes just in time to see a pair flung towards him. Despite his slow reactions under the circumstances, he caught them in one hand and held them defensively against his chest.

"They were all I could find" he replied, his voice sounding hoarse and miserable even to himself. Jack turned back towards him, looking as bright-eyed and energetic as ever, and smirked as he folded his arms.

"Want to borrow some of mine?" he suggested, one eyebrow twitching.

"Give me strength" Ianto muttered to himself, struggling into a sitting position. He closed his eyes and brought his hand to his own forehead, half-heartedly attempting to brush away the pain. Jack chuckled, the sound not conducive to soothing Ianto's discomfort, and he tried his hardest to glare. Judging by the grin on Jack's face, it wasn't working.

"Ten minutes. I'll be waiting in the car" he ordered with a jaunty wink, and with a dramatic flourish of his ridiculous coat, he left

Ianto fell back onto his bed, choosing to grab just one more minute of semi-comfort. His thoughts remained in disarray, disbelief unhindered even by the previous night's alcohol consumption, but perhaps... perhaps throwing himself into whatever Torchwood did would at least distract him while he waited for that passage home. If all he could do was wait, at least he didn't have to drive himself insane with the agony of being left alone with his thoughts.

"John Tucker, twenty-five years old, born in Penarth... well, fat lot of use that goldmine of information is."

Ianto's eyes remained on the scene, but he was vaguely aware of Owen flicking the police notebook closed and tossing it casually back towards a jumpy PC.

"Thanks mate; leave this one to us."

"Yes, sir."

The young officer left them to it, the heels of his sharp black shoes echoing down the bleak, damp alley where Ianto found himself. The sky was the same battleship-grey as the cracked Tarmac, making the grim scene spread across it stand out in its gory reds and faded blues.

"What have we got, Owen?" Jack asked, and Ianto glared at his boss' back as the man stepped casually over the recumbent corpse.

"Stabbing."

"Really?" Ianto replied sarcastically, gesturing towards the thick smear of congealed blood soaking through the back of John Tucker's denim jacket.

"He speaks!" Owen exclaimed in faux-surprise, his upper lip twitching in a sneer. Ianto had pointedly not said a word since joining Jack and Owen in the Land Rover, too lost within his own thoughts for idle conversation.

"So where's the entry wound?" Jack interrupted.

"I don't know yet" Owen admitted, leaning closer to Ianto than Ianto was comfortable with, but he'd be damned if he was going to show it. "But the fact that there are no obvious markings makes it all the more likely that this was alien. The coppers obviously thought so, or they wouldn't have called us in."

"Uh-huh. Time of death?"

"Around midnight" Ianto stated. "I can smell alcohol, and unless pub closing times have changed drastically, midnight seems about right for the level of delayed rigor mortis after last night's temperatures."

"I'm surprised you could even feel the cold, with the amount of whiskey you put away" Jack added in a jovial tone. Ianto ignored him, pushing himself up from his squatted position. The air above the victim smelt fresh and clean compared to the scents of dead flesh and lager which now clung to the pavement, and he sucked in several deep, cool breaths.

"Hey, look what I found" Owen exclaimed, plucking a long strip of blue and white fabric from the muddy guttering near John Tucker's feet. "Cardiff Blues fan?"

"Hmm. Maybe the killer is a Swansea supporter" Jack replied nonchalantly. Ianto felt a now-familiar flare of irritation towards the man and his apparently inability to take even death seriously.

"Maybe we should take him back to Torchwood's lair and see what we can work out about his murder" he stated sharply, barely resisting the urge to punctuate his suggestion by labelling Jack an insufferable twat. Simply thinking it was almost enough make him smile.

Returning to Torchwood's base ('The Hub' as Jack had pretentiously labelled it) was a new experience in the light of day. The man insisted, as they strode through the false ground-level offices where Ianto had been lied two for seven straight days, that he was designing a way to get down to the base more quickly. Some kind of lift, perhaps, or even an escalator. As it was, there were two entrances – the long way through the guts of the building, or the short way which required wading knee-deep through raw sewage. The former was more popular, he admitted. Even then, the 'long way' seemed to only take a minute or two now that the route was lit and Ianto was following his male colleagues, who were striding ahead at a confident pace, Jack with a corpse flung over his shoulder as if it were nothing. As they reached what Ianto had initially thought to be a dead end, he discovered that, on closer inspection, the light-up hexagon engraved into the metal also had a 'T' for 'Torchwood' printed in the middle of it. How utterly Jack to be so ostentatious about the minor decorative details in an underground base.

The innards of The Hub also seemed different now that the shock had dulled. They had returned to find Toshiko frantically tapping at her keys, while Gwen and Suzie leaned over some metallic tech on the welding table. All three of them trailed Ianto with their eyes as he entered, and he ignored them, unwilling to allow them to see either his lingering hurt or his fledgeling acceptance. Instead, he stared straight ahead as he trailed Jack and Owen towards the medical bay, and watched as his so-called colleague (was Harper even a sergeant? Ianto had assumed that the police-based hierarchical titles were fake, but perhaps they used them regardless) got to work immediately, deftly stripping Tucker of his clothing, cleaning up the copious amounts of blood from his back, and eventually locating the entry wound.

"A-ha!" Owen shouted in victory, causing everybody else gathered around the cramped autopsy area to start. Gwen and Toshiko sat close together on the short stairwell, Suzie and Jack were leaning against the railing above, and Ianto remained close to the trolley, but not so close that Owen could accuse him of getting in the way.

"Here, at the nape" Owen pointed with a gloved finger. Ianto leaned closer and squinted down at the barely-visible nick in the greyish skin, directly between two vertebrae. The death would have been mercifully instantaneous, at least.

"Precise" Jack stated from above, sounding almost approving.

"Almost surgical" Owen replied.

"And what exactly makes you think this is alien?" Ianto felt compelled to ask. Their had to be a reason for such warped, ridiculous logic. This may have been their livelihood, but were they not jumping to conclusions just a tad? A little part of Ianto's psyche mocked him for remaining in denial about Torchwood and what it supposedly represented. Ianto ignored it. He was getting good at that.

"I've never seen anything like this before. Even the most well-orchestrated of human murders is clumsy, messy in comparison – this is elegant. Whatever killed this man wanted something from him. Something physical, perhaps. Chemical. I need to run blood samples to test for alien traces from whatever the thing stuck into him."

The crack of a rubber glove being peeled away ricocheted sharply against the walls.

"Shame he'll miss the match tomorrow. Bet he was looking forward to that" Suzie said, and Ianto glanced up to see her toying with a clear plastic bag containing the Cardiff Blues scarf.

"What match?" he asked, folding his arms.

"The Cardiff versus Swansea match?" Suzie drawled in reply, as if Ianto were a particularly slow child.

"Which you neglected to mention" Ianto huffed with annoyance. "In which case, this could be nothing more than a grudge attack; did you ever consider that?"

"If this was rugby related, the victim would have serious injuries" Owen pointed out, huffing a sigh.

"He's dead; that's quite serious" Ianto replied with equal volumes of sarcasm.

"He'd have contusions, abrasions... he'd have been beaten up, not stabbed in the back of the neck" Owen added, making a sweeping gesture towards the corpse. "Not with that kind of precision, out in the open, at night."

"You don't know that" Ianto argued, though the statement was feeble. "The murderer could have had experience in medical anatomy."

"Tell me you've ever seen a wound that shape, in this context, then I might take your theories seriously" Owen responded, seemingly done with the conversation as he began to mount the stairwell. Ianto grudgingly leaned back down to the corpse, eyeing the wound. He hadn't seen it before, but the edges of the puncture were shaped in a minute zigzag pattern, perfectly angular in its irregularity. He squinted at it a moment longer, startled when he straightened up once more to find that Jack had descended the stairwell quietly enough for him not to notice, and was now on the opposite side of the trolley, close enough for the scent of his aftershave to smother even the tang of decomposition.

"What's it going to take for you to believe?" Jack asked quietly, quieter than Ianto had ever heard him speak, looking not at Ianto but at John Tucker's nape.

"Proof" Ianto replied, knowing precisely how absurd that sounded. His circumstances, this technology, the creature in the cells... still he needed one more thing. Something else to confirm it. Something absolutely inarguably real.

Jack didn't scoff, didn't question him, didn't even look up. His own reply was a short, simple, confident "fine", before spinning on his heel and retreating with his swagger intact.